What is causing disk activity when PC is

I often hear hard disk activity when my computer is just sitting idle. I want to know which program(s) are reading/writing to my disk. My reasons for wanting to know include making sure that no unauthorized program is running, excluding unneeded programs from startup to free up memory and cpu, and to understand more about my PC and the programs/processes that run in “background”.

I’d like a utility program that will display useful information about the program/process that is doing the disk read/write and display this as the activity occurs. If you know of such a utility program, please communicate to me the name of the software and the name of the software’s publisher.

Thank you.

Jeff Cohen
jrcohen@swbell.net